Also, I've been informed that there will
be an Open Video Developer meeting
on Friday February 1st 2008 at 21:00 UTC on irc.freenode.net
in #openvideo.
Should be an interesting meeting, sounds like at least
Synfig, Blender and
Cinelerra people will be there, hopefully many more.

KL airport has free wifi, it works
fine on Windows, but my Linux install relies on DHCP to get
an IP address, gateway and DNS servers. I tried capturing
some wifi traffic with wireshark, but had no luck. I
remember in Thailand having to write down network settings
from Windows computers in netcafes, then manually apply the
settings after booting the copy of Debian on my external
hard-drive. I'm currently using NetworkManager. On the way
home from DebConf I'd like to be able to use the net in KL.
What nasty Windows protocol am I missing support for?

So, back to geekery after too many months away. While we
were in Thailand, I met Theppitak
Karoonboonyanan and his friend Neutron Soutmun and a
couple of others from the Thai Linux community. Thep is in
the NM process for Debian, he maintains Thai support
packages in Debian and Neutron is a Debian user. Neutron
writes firmware for GPS receivers (IIRC) and other GIS
stuff, I'm hoping he will get involved in the debian-gis
subproject. I think I convinced Neutron to at least think
about applying to NM :D. We talked about a lot of things,
mainly about Thai localisation and the challenges involved.
He mentioned that the language barrier is a big problem for
Thai people, so their main focus has been firstly
infrastructure (text rendering, layout and wrapping, fonts,
input methods, locale, etc) and now translation (and the
associated, laborious localisation efforts). He told me a
bit about the writing system and how it is related to other
systems in the area. Thep also mentioned the possibility of
debconf9 being in Thailand, I recon it would be bloody
awesome to have debconf in Asia. At least one other Debian
Developer is interested in this, madduck is the initial
instigator. I hope we both make it to debconf in the UK
this year. I also visited the open source lab at NECTEC (the Thai
National Electronics and Computer Technology Center), which
is government funded. There, they develop LinuxTLE (an
Ubuntu based desktop distro), LinuxSIS (a simple internet
server for schools and businesses) and do lots of
translation and advocacy work within NECTEC and with
businesses and other organisations within Thailand. One
thing about LinuxPLE which I noted was that during the
post-install GUI configuration step, there is an option to
setup the system to use fonts from a mounted Windows
partition. IIRC, they explained that they found this was
important because of a reliance on Microsoft fonts in
Thailand. While I was there, I went to a couple of other
labs and saw a demo of a cool Thai OCR and car registration
plate recognition system, English to Thai machine
translation (text) and direct English speech to Thai
speech conversion. They were also working on some medical
imaging and speech recognition stuff that I didn't get to
see. I also met the founder of linux.thai.net, whose
company develops this online map for
Bangkok..

Arrived
at Ko Phuket a few days ago, I'm off the ship and at a
hotel. In Bintan, we saw an interesting looking resort with
plenty of coconut trees, logs and other stuff floating in
the harbour, a snake oil merchant (with a live cobra),
barges and transformer ferries, pouring rain and bad
drainage. We left Bintan, went south for Selat Durian, then
north past Singapore Straits, into the infamous Straits of
Malacca and north past Malaysia and to the tourist island of
Phuket. Along the way, we saw the coals of sunset, massive
jellyfish in the dark green water, huge queues of massive
ships covering the horizon as we passed the entrance to the
Straits of Singapore, lights from Singapore in the distance,
the pirate-free Straits of Malacca, where many large cargo
and other ships passed us, the fleet of lights/boats that
sprung up as if from nowhere some 50 miles off Phuket, the
last sunrise on the ship (in a bay near Phuket) and an
awesome NYE party on the ship.

Leaving the Heraclitus
has been hard, I'm gonna miss that black and red ship and
the awesome crew who got us the 3000 or so nautical miles
from Cairns to Phuket. Now it is time to visit some Thai
Linux developers and return to Australia.

The
past few weeks, we changed our route to visit an uninhabited
island (aka Ko Pulau Island) said to be "National
Geographic, man" by some Americans we met in Kupang. On the
way to Ko Pulau Island we saw a large school of pilot whales
and dolphins, a humpback or other whale close to shore, a
blue starfish and hot water vents nearby on the same mostly
dead reef, a flock of birds feasting on a dense school of
fish, a manta ray, a bonfire on the beach shared with the
kids of Rote (who we swapped roast banannas and coconuts
with), a clean hull and renewed sea-sickness. At Ko Pulau
Island, we saw a long white beach made of small bead things
instead of sand, with surf at either end and reef in
between, a green lagoon with islands being eaten away at the
base, a monkey-head rock, pink coral, reef fish, sea
urchins, various pieces of flotsam washed up on the beach
(flip-flops, a light-bulb, bottles, wood, burnie-beans,
nautilus shells, a seabird egg, a dead seabird and other
crap), sunset over the ocean with golden cirrus in the sky,
turtle nests, tracks and hatchlings scurrying off into the
water, Indonesian fishermen in need of water and turtle
eggs, tidal pools with the occasional crab, ghost crabs
darting towards the water, a pandanus stand, a small cave
surrounded by discarded turtle eggshells, spinifex, hermit
crabs, scrambling lizards, sunburn and other things. Later
in our voyage, we saw a big lone flying fish, land looming
mountainous on starboard, TNI, gratis reef fish, water
buffalo and threatening rain clouds. The next major stop was
a bay on the south side of Sumba, black cliffs to port and
an eroded hillside to starboard. There, we enjoyed the
excellent snorkeling against the cliffs and off the beach,
birds calling from the forest, wasps - shiny blue and
otherwise, meeting roaming cows in the forest, forest fungi
and other sights. We met some fishermen and drove through
the forested slopes toward a nearby city. On the way, we
visited an Indonesian village and saw their traditional
animist temple, ample baby pigs & dogs, tons of kids
trying to get in photos, satellite dishes and graves in
front of houses. Unfortunately, I crashed once we reached
the hotel, missing eating and night life, but I did enjoy
the sights from the windows of the cramped 4WD we were in.
We headed for the 9.8 knot passage of Selat Sape, complete
with eddies, currents, a barracuda and the steep slopes of a
silent volcano. Since there, we saw an increasing number of
interesting and curious Indonesian vessels, fish traps, the
grey shapes of dolphins swimming in the aqua water under the
bow, a floating sandal, a school of mahi-mahi jumping out of
the water, a misty night, numerous schools of feeding fish,
entangled luminescent trails left by dolphins swimming in
the phosphorescent water beneath the bow, flashes of
lightning in the distance, our first rain since Cairns, the
associated storm, Jack the fisherman (a mast hallucination)
and other things. Our next stop was Kalimunjava (north of
Java, Indonesia), more than half way to Phuket. We spent a
week there, watched lightning, collected rain, visited the
local school, dived and snorkelled on the magnificant reef
with some really nice university students (hi Lely, Dudu,
Jaos and others) from Java who were doing a study on the
corals and hiked up the steep slopes of the island. From
there we ambled past Borneo, towards Bintan, near Singapore,
experiencing the first non-calm seas in ages, dolphins in
the storm, floating lines of debris, big barges, container
ships and megatankers, a fancy, shiny yacht, fishing vessels
with 50,000 lights, Rain Drop and it's egg (child of Rain
the gecko), amazing cloudscapes at sunrise, throughout the
day and at sunset on the way. Amazingly, we met the &#x221E;
(Infinity, the
new PCRF vessel) one find day
in the South China Sea on their way to Bali. Eddie saw them
from 5 miles away and knew almost straight away it was them.
Michelle came on board and a lone daytime cumi (squid) swam
between us as we parted. Before we arrived at Pulau Bintan
(near Singapore), we saw seasnakes and a palm tree floating
and lots of wind and rain.

We will probably arrive in
Thailand by January and I'm thinking of passing thru Sydney
on the way home, so let so please mail me if you want to
meet up.

We
arrived in Kupang (West Timor), will be heading off on Tues
7th to motor through Indonesia and towards Thailand,
hopefully visiting Roti, Flores, Sumbawa and or other
islands in the area along the way. We've seen the
ever-changing iridescent colours of a dying mahi-mahi, tuna
blood, misty hills of a strange new land looming on the
horizon, the unfamiliarly shaped Indonesian fishing and
other boats, dead-calm seas in the early morning, a bossy
French warship, customs planes flying overhead and calling
us every day, the eerie blue of the deep ocean with floating
jellies at a swim stop, taking down the mainsail in the
channel, shitter crabs, oil platforms in the distance,
flocks of flying fish getting out of our way during a calm
sunset, bird-stowaways, the amazing crystal goo of
phosphorescence off the bow, zillions of mini-buses (taxis)
in Kupang and many other things. The open-sea sailing has
been mostly relaxing, although we motored a lot of the way
from Thursday Island. I'm hoping there will be some more
wind, but it looks like we'll be motoring to Thailand (to
arrive after Christmas), maybe against the wind since the
season has changed. I'm looking forward to finally doing
some diving and snorkeling during the next leg of the
journey.

If there are any Indonesian Debian or
Indymedia folk that would like to meet up with me for a
keysigning and or bintang, please send me an email and I'll
try to let you know if an opportunity arises.

So
tomorrow, we leave Australia from the administrative center
of Thursday Island, just past the northern tip of the Cape
York. The past few weeks we've been sailing successfully
through the dangers of the Coral Sea. I've seen a lonely
seagoing turtle, the fine coral beaches at Lizard Island,
sunrises and sunsets, dolphins playing with a fish
underneath the bow and surfing the waves, many anchorages we
didn't have time to go ashore at, reefs we didn't dive at, a
torn sail, huge freight ships doing 20 knots (RVH did 6
maximum so far), kilometers of coconut trees on Chili beach
near Lockhart, the hospitality of folks in "the last outpost
of civilisation" (Portland Roads), some great Aboriginal art
at the Lockhart River Community, amazingly huge white sand
dunes on Cape York and lots and lots of ocean. I've felt
sea-sickness, home-sickness, missing-the-internet-sickness,
love of the sea and an assortment of other emotions. The
past weeks have been a huge learning curve, nothing we could
have done in port would have been preparation enough for
raising anchor, docking, motoring out of the harbour
channel, navigating, raising and lowering sails, helming, 30
knot winds and big swell. We've survived so far though and
I'm looking forward to open-sea sailing without constant
dangers all about, which we will probably get some of during
the next 3 weeks sailing to Kupang
(Timor).

Unexpected, but pleasant, has been the lack
of distraction provided by the Internet, I've found I've
been able to work on my personal free software projects more
effectively without it. That is, when we have generator
power available (ships batteries are old and not so good).
It is times like these I wish I had 1) a Debian mirror 2) a
distributed VCS (quilt will do for now though) 3) tried to
get wireless working before I left 4) solar panels.

Finally got my shit together and got a flight to
Argentina for DebConf!

Perth -> Sydney -> Auckland -> Buenos Aires
-> Mar del Plata.

That is quite a bit of flying and a long bus trip ending
quite early on
the 4th. It will definitely be worth it if DebConf7 was
anything to go on.

Hopefully by DebConf I can get my hands on an OpenMoko
FreeRunner to do
some Debian porting work during DebCamp and possibly mapping
out the
streets of Mar del Plata for OpenStreetMap. Of course I need
to work on
completing analysis of the results of the Debian user and
new contributor
surveys and figure out what to say about synfig

As a Debian developer I have on occasion felt a bit out
of touch with doing things with Debian and out of touch with
other users. I mentioned to some folks at DebConf7 that I
felt I focused too much on working on Debian and not
actually connected to what the benefit of working on Debian
is.

Partially as a result of those feelings and partially
because I thought it would be an interesting thing to do, I
started to prepare a couple of simple surveys early this
year. The first one went out earlier last month and I posted
the second one a few days ago after far too much
procrastination and running the wording by a few people -
thanks to Micah for the drug boats question :)

So, if you are a Debian
user or are a new
contributor (or
DM/NM/AM or new DD), I would greatly appreciate hearing from
you. Please respond to the survey addresses rather than my
personal ones.

So far I have 15 or so responses to the new contributor
survey, but ideally I would have many more, so please send
something in if you are getting involved in Debian
development or helping others get involved.

I've had about 24 responses to the user survey so far.
Many of you will have heard about Debian success stories
like Extremadura, Bhutan, HP, Skolelinux, Sanger and other
high-profile Debian users. I'm hoping to hear about as many
different uses of Debian as possible, so please keep the responses
coming in.

The primary audience for these surveys is the Debian
development community. The results will go to the
debian-devel-announce and debian-private, I also hope to
have a discussion or two about them at DebConf8 in
Argentina. There is no time-frame for closing the survey or
releasing the results, like the Debian distribution, I
release when ready :)

PS: Please install the popularity-contest package on your
machines if possible and subscribe to the
packages.qa.debian.org pages for packages that you
particularly care about.

PPS: Please feel free to ask me questions in your
responses and I will attempt to reply as time allows.